Back from the black hole

OK, so here and I promised I was going to write regularly...and then I sort of fell off the map. Well, of course I didn't really -- I just got a little busy with four intensive weeks of Hungarian language classes. It was seriously intense. But it was also extremely awesome.

Looking through our door

Yesterday was the last day, and I'm really amazed at how far I've come in four weeks. I'm sad not to be cramming Hungarian for 6+ hours a day, but I'm also happy for a little break. So now I can get you a little more about Szeged, and a little bit more about our lives here.

The view to the left from
our door

As I mentioned in my previous post, we are living in a historic building. It's called the Ungár-Mayer house, and it was designed by local architect Ede Magyar and built in 1910-1911. It's a beautiful example of Art Nouveau style. If you're interested, here's a little more about it (and some of the other Art Nouveau buildings in Szeged and a few other cities.)

Szeged is positioned next to the Tisza river, and it's experienced a lot of floods. The most recent big one was the "great flood" of 1879, when the city was under water for four months. (The slope from the river to the city was going the wrong way, so the water couldn't drain back into the river when the water went down. They fixed that since then.) The city was so damaged that about 95% of the buildings had to be demolished, so this made space for a lot of new construction -- much of it in various Art Nouveau styles. We're lucky that the great flood wasn't in the 1970's, right?

Ronan looking at the Belvarosi bridge
and the Tisza river

Another interesting thing about the reconstruction is that the city was built with a ring road system, very similar to Paris' ring roads. I felt clever this week because I figured out that "körút" (which is one of the types of road here, like "avenue" or "street") means that it's one of the ring roads -- since "körül" means "around." Of course I could be wrong about this - I haven't asked anyone about it yet. I'll let you know!

Karasz street, walking east towards
Szechenyi square

So back to where we live: our apartment building is on a pedestrian street right in the centre of Szeged - this is pretty awesome, and I still feel so incredibly lucky that they found us this apartment. One of the obvious advantages to this location is the proximity to lots of things - the university, plenty of different kinds of shops, parks, squares, historic things, concerts, festivals, ice cream stores (lots of these -- yay! Actually no -- it's gelato, not ice cream), bakeries... It's pretty neat. We're walking distance to pretty much everything, and easy public transportation distance to everything else. I've never lived anywhere like this. The closest I've ever come is the first year we lived in Eugene - we lived walking distance to most things we needed, and biking distance to most other things. But we weren't in the middle of town, and of course Eugene isn't a town like Szeged. Well, in some ways it is -- they're both college towns, and they're both by rivers. But towns and cities in Europe have a very different architecture and feel from towns and cities in the USA. But anyway, I've never lived in a city where I'm right in the centre of what's going on, so I'm enjoying this novel experience.

Kossuth Lajos statue, just down Karasz street from us